Image description: Drawing of a spinal cord crowned by a yellow crescent moon and woven round with a meandering, intuitive line. Text reads: II. The High Priestess.
Context
I started working on the High Priestess card months ago.1 I read all of the source materials and I took my notes. I learned that the High Priestess is about quiet power and secret magic. Michelle Tea writes that “she represents solitary magic, the witch without a coven, practicing alone.” She’s concerned with reminding us to listen to our inner voice, to trust our gut. She wants us to dream journal, to body scan, to count on the slow reveal of deep knowledge that comes from noticing the sensations in our bodies and inviting our subconscious to tell us what we need to hear.
The drawing for this card came out of me fully formed, though I thought I was only making a draft. I drew the vertebrae of the spine in a gestural, unconsidered way, and when I counted them there were exactly the right number. I drew the squiggle of intuition without thinking, and liked the look of it immediately. I drew the crescent moon at the top while thinking of how imperceptible the moon’s movements are to me, their timeline a trickle from new to full and back again. I beheld what I had made, and then—I doubted. Did the drawing fit in with the overall vibe of these drawings?23 Maybe not. Maybe I should locate the spine inside a human shape, maybe sitting in a chair? Maybe that’s too on the nose. Also sounds hard to draw. In a fit of indecision and overwhelm4 I set my little notebook down to consider it a little later. That was in late March.
At the time, I’d been feeling sort of existentially itchy. Like I wanted to move to a new apartment or possibly a new country. Like the volume of my belongings was threatening to crush me. Like I couldn’t stand to eat another bite of my own cooking. Like something needed sloughing off or shaking out or flipping over.
Unhelpfully, the High Priestess didn’t seem to agree. When I pulled the cards and read the books and connected the dots, it felt like she was telling me to sit still. She was saying things like “the answers to the questions you have are within, not without” and “stillness is called for” and, literally, “make no sudden moves.” For the first time, the card I’d sat down to study didn’t seem to magically fit the situation in which I found myself.
It was a bit of a let down, to be honest. I’ve learned (and relearned, and learned again) that I can only write what makes me curious. Things about which I am on either the near or far side of an “Aha!” What is distracting me or insisting on itself. That is, I have a really hard time writing anything I think I should.56 And I wasn’t jazzed about this High Priestess card.
Looking again at my source material now, I see that many other interpretations of this card were possible. I could have chosen to see it as an invitation to new spiritual journeying, an opening into magic, an internal overhaul afoot. I could have chosen to interpret it as an incitement to trust my own gut, despite the fact that said gut seemed to be on a kind of reckless-destructive bent. Either of these would have more readily scratched my existential itch.
Instead, I saw stillness and reflection, and I didn’t like it. So I put the cards away and I rearranged my furniture and cleaned out my dresser and endlessly browsed listings for expensive apartments and houses in the country. I scratched the itch in the least disruptive ways I could.7 I didn’t write much, because I was busy but also because I was avoiding. The High Priestess wanted to be written about, and I wanted her to shut her smug mouth.
Mostly I forgot about her. I’ve had an unusually high volume of client work in March and April, Spring has made me want to be outside far past reason, and the violence in Gaza has made me want to be in the streets in ways that have impacted my body and spirit. I’ve been busy, is what I’m saying. The last few weeks, though, I’ve been remembering her.
On a call with my old friend Chris, I found myself talking about the class, about how I believe that we desperately need spiritual connection amidst this exhausting nightmare slog of dying capitalism. I found him saying that he’s been asking some of the same questions, and looking for someone who’s doing something about it. When I told him I was working on a book, I said it in the sarcastic and self-deprecating way that I always do. He waved it off, said “There’s no rush. Books are gestational projects. You have to just sit with them for as long as they take.” The High Priestess swam into my vision, smiling a fond sort of I-told-you-so smile.
I went back to my draft of the letter to Charlie, the draft now as old as he was when I wrote it. The thing had been finished and the audio recorded and everything, but something hadn’t felt right, and so I didn’t hit send. Coming back to it, I rewrote the beginning for the fourth time. This time it clicked. Ms. HP looked very pleased with herself.
I threw together a little Beltane ritual for a few friends, with very little time to prep or cook or anything, and a small voice in my head just kept repeating “it’ll be fine, you’ll just do whatever it makes sense to do in the moment.” That night we sat in the grass looking up at flower petals falling like snow, which I couldn’t possibly have planned for. We had more food than eight of us could eat. Walking around the garden smearing honey on trees by way of offering (not, for the record, one of the activities I’d considered for the evening), I knew we’d found the thing we needed. The intuition of the group got us where we needed to go, and the High Priestess smiled.
Maybe the sloughing off or shaking out or flipping over that needs happening needs happening on my insides, not in my circ*mstances. Maybe if I slow down enough to notice my instincts and choose whether and how to follow them, that is radical change enough. Maybe if I sit still. Maybe if I just keep doing what I’ve been doing.
To that end, I’m running spiritual practice class three times over the next year or so:
Summer 2024 | Tuesdays, 12pm-1pm Eastern | June 25th - July 30th
Fall 2024 | Wednesdays 6:30-7:30pm Eastern | October 2nd - November 6th
Winter 2025 | Sundays 5pm-6pm Eastern | January 26th - March 2nd
This class is for every single person who feels purpose-restless, who has trouble sitting still. This is for anyone who had wicca books as a teenager. Anyone who doubted their grandma’s folk medicine when she was alive and is now desperate to learn it. This is for anyone who left religion because it hurt them deeply but misses the beautiful ways it sometimes made them feel. This is for folks who collect crystals but never use them, who pull tarot but not with purpose. This is for anyone who loves the ritual that happens at holidays, but doesn’t feel like they have access to it the rest of the time.
The space is, come to think of it, very much in the spirit of the High Priestess card. It offers both principles and concrete tools for tapping into intuition, for listening deeply to whatever is higher or deeper or bigger than our own conscious thought. It is the most fertile kind of sitting still.
Maybe it is for you.
Either way, this is where I’ll be this year—channeling High Priestess energy, noticing and inviting others to notice, trusting and inviting others to trust, again and again and again.
Stuff
These two pieces are some of the most resonant writing I’ve read recently on the experience of social media right now as it relates to Palestine:
From n+1: “People in the comments say don’t give up, we need you, the world sees you, we are trying to speak up, but it’s true, we are useless, we’re ashamed of ourselves, God forgive us, we’ve failed you.”
And from Defector: “A child has lost her limbs, a cow gives birth, a teenager has finished chemo, a cat is enjoying her last brush, those viral dress pants are restocked on TikTok shop, and she’s "looking for a man in finance with a trust fund, 6-5, blue eyes… I wish I knew how to hold all of this inside myself at the same time.”
In Mississippi, a friend of a person I know went missing and died. Please sign this petition to help make sure he gets the justice he deserves.
In Gaza, yet another friend of a person I know is desperately trying to escape. Please consider giving generously to his family’s GoFundMe, even if generous for you means just $5.
This film is vibey and complicated and mysterious and mundane and really worth a watch.
BRIDGERTON. Nicola Coughlan is an extremely talented fat woman getting the full ingenue treatment and it is making me SO EMOTIONAL. If you can’t get past the wealth p*rn or the marriage-as-goal plot of the series, fair enough, but just treat yourself to her instagram or that of her stylist or just google photos of her because good god.
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1
I’m making my own Tarot deck, as you well know.
2
In hindsight yes I am aware that there were only two previous drawings so there’s not really an established aesthetic to adhere to.
3
I am also aware that the thing I am making is a draft and as such needn’t be perfect, but try telling that to the parts of me who tolerate nothing less than the exceptionally good.
4
Read: tantrum.
5
These are the vibes. My sense of consequences and strategy and what-have-you are the person pulling, cute dog is any semblance of motivation.
6
Years ago I took a personality test that told me I was a Rebel and that the slogan of our type is “You can’t make me, and neither can I,” which produced in me both a rough bark of a laugh and some real ringing clarity.
7
Which, come to think of it, is maybe all she was suggesting.
